Here’s how to learn about this fascinating subject correctly:

1. Identify anything you’re going to eat with 100% certainty. Some wild plants are poisonous, and they may resemble edible species.
2. Start by learning a few species that lack poisonous look-alikes well. Follow them through the seasons before expanding your repertoire.
3. Watch what you’re picking so nearby poisonous plants don’t inadvertently wind up in your bag.
4. Eat small amounts the first time, in case of allergies or other adverse reactions.
5. Collect only a small fraction of very common wild species where they’re abundant. This is more efficient and leaves no ecological footprint.
6. Avoid contaminated or sprayed areas such as regions within 50 feet of heavy traffic (where heavy metals settle), or railroad rights-of-way, which are sprayed.
7. Rinse off your harvest before preparing it.

Here’s one example of a common edible species, below. You’ll change your connection to our local ecosystems, and your food choices, forever:
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)

This common edible tree with a history, and the original source of root beer. It’s easy to recognize because it has 3 kinds of fragrant leaves, all smooth-edged: one is oval, one is 3-lobed, and one is mitten-shaped. This medium-sized tree bears loose clusters of small, yellow, 5-petaled flowers in mid-spring, followed by ovoid, blue-black berries. It grows in great abundance in the woods and thickets, along roadsides, and at the edges of woods. To find restaurants using local food, click here. To learn more about local foraging in the New York area, click here.

Intolerant of shade, any saplings that don’t come up in full sunlight can’t survive, so you can pull them up, and they’re in season all year. Wash off the roots and simmer them, covered, 20 minutes. Native Americans used this tasty tea as a spring tonic, and Europeans in the 1500s profited by exporting and selling this native herb with claims for its health benefits growing in lock step with their greed. Eventually, it was supposed to cure everything. Unfortunately, everything includes sexually transmitted diseases, and soon anyone holding a cup of sassafras tea was suspected of having syphilis or gonorrhea. The bottom dropped out of the sassafras market, and the merchants were ruined.

Today, you can chill the tea and stir in chilled sparkling water and a sweetener to make root beer. Or peel the root’s soft cambium, the thin, white layer surrounding the wood, and use it in place of cinnamon to make very exotic-tasting drinks and desserts.

Beware! The Food and Drug Administration removed sassafras from the market when an experiment showed that if you have only the equivalent of 200 cups of sassafras tea, made from artificial concentrate, every day for only 2 years, and you happen to be a rat, you’ll have an increased chance of developing liver cancer. Rats change safrole, the active constituent, into a carcinogen. Humans don’t, and no one ever got sick from drinking sassafras tea. Also, heat destroys safrole. Furthermore, beer, due to its alcohol content, is 14 times a carcinogenic to humans as sassafras is to rodents, and beer’s still available for sale.

Steve Brill is a full-time, freelance, seasonal naturalist and environmental educator, as well as an author, who teaches people about the abundant, renewable wild foods that most of us don’t recognize or notice, hidden anywhere there’s greenery.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Brill

This is probably because many people are almost entirely ignorant of wild greens. The wild plants that can be harvested (often in your own back garden) and consumed.

Indeed, as soon as April turns into May edible wild plants spring into profusion. If you know what to look for then you can probably spot six edible species right in your own back garden. If you venture further afield, to a back lane, for example then with a little practice you will see thirty or more wild plants that are both edible and, more importantly, good to eat.

In fact there are well over a hundred common plants (many of them considered weeds) that you can collect and add to your own recipes. There are as many rarer plants again so that anyone with enough knowledge will be able to gather one wild plant or another all year round. Even in the depths of winter there are enough wild plants in abundance for you to be able to create a hedgerow salad.

Here I present two recipes designed around and incorporating wild spring greens.

Springtime Fritters

Ingredients:

180g flour

pinch of salt

1 egg

450ml flat beer

300g edible leaves and flowers (hawthorn flowers, broom flowers, gorse flowers, young beech leaves, hop shoots, bisort leaves, ground elder leaves, sow thistle, cleavers, ramsons, henbit deadnettle, red deadnettle, white deadnettle [anything that's to hand, basically])

Method:

Add the flour and salt to a large bowl, make a well in the middle and break the egg into this. Pour in a little of the beer and start to mix. Gradually pour more beer and incorporate more of the flour. Mix thoroughly so that there are no lumps and keep adding beer until our have a batter about the consistency of single cream. Cover the bowl with a cloth and allow to rest for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile trim your greens and flowers and rinse with plenty of cold water. Heat oil in a wok or deep pan and mix your flowers and greens into the batter. Drop spoonfuls of the batter mix into the hot oil and fry until golden, turning once.

Lift them onto a plate using a slotted spoon, drizzle with a little honey and serve warm.

A Spring Tart

Ingredients:

80g of spring buds (hawthorn flower and leaf buds, gorse flowers and beech leaves just out of bud)

150g spring greens (the young leaves of primroses, violets and wild strawberries)

12 primrose flowers

80g young spinach

100ml double cream

300ml single cream

60g naples bisket (or any dry sponge cake)

1 whole egg

2 egg yolks

enough pastry for a 22cm pie shell

60g sugar

salt, to taste

freshly-grated cinnamon

Method:

Place the primrose flowers in sugar to partly candy them.

Meanwhile, wash the buds and greens, drain them then chop very small. Add to a pan along with the single and double cream and bring to a boil. Simmer for 3 minutes, or until the greens wilt then take off the heat. Finely chop or grate the naples bisket and stir into the cream along with the sugar, salt and spices. Set aside to cool.

After you have made your pie crust (use either the short-crust for an expensive pie or the standard pie-crust recipes) place in a 22cm pie dish, add dried beans to keep the bottom flat and blind bake in an oven at 200°C for ten minutes.

Whisk the eggs into the cream mixture. Pour this mixture into the part-baked pie crust and dot the surface with butter. Bake the tart in an oven at 170°C for 75 minutes or until the surface turns a golden brown. Take out of the oven and allow to cool completely before decorating the top with the candied primrose flowers.

I hope that these recipes have given you a taste of how you can use the various wild foods and flowers on your doorstep to make tasty dishes from and that you will now want to find out more about how to include wild ingredients in your own cookery.

Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Recipes site which specializes in Wild Food Recipes. If you would like to include more wild foods in your own cooking then why not check-out the Guide to Wild Foods that can help you identify the wild foods you can use in your own cookery.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dyfed_Lloyd_Evans

In Europe, at least, the Second World War marked a watershed in culinary tastes. Foraging for wild foods became an essential part of survival. Wild-sourced foods often became essential dietary staples for those who could access those foods. It was inevitable, after the shortages of the war cam to an end that people would shie away from such subsistence foods and that commercial agricultural produce and processed foods became the be-all and end-all of daily sustenance. Two generations lost the knowledge of which wild foods were edible and which wern’t (with the notable exception of fruit such as blackberries and certain mushrooms). Consumers became more distant from the land than ever before.

But the wheel is turning. Concern for the planet has led to increased awareness and interest in the possibilities of foraging and the finding of wild food sources. This is partly a matter of curiosity and partly an increased interest in the recipes of the past and their ingredients. There is also an increased interest in growing a larger range of herbs and flowers in the garden to attract insects (and many of these insect-attracting plants happen to be edible).

This has resulted in increased knowledge and curiosity about ancient food sources and how wild and different foodstuffs can be used. This the ancient Elizabethan trade in marsh samphire has been renewed and samphire is now on the menu. But it doesn’t stop there. Those people who would look for blackberries in summer are now collecting elder flowers in May, elderberries in August, wild plums and hazelnuts in September, and sloes in October — and these are just the common fruit.

Once you start down this road of discovery you find that common garden weeds such a bedstraw, fat hen and chickweed are not only edible but make good vegetables. Rather than grubbing these up and adding them to your compost heap, you can wash them and add them to your dinner plate! Then there are the wild herbs, the wild greens such as ramsons (wild garlic) in spring and Field Mustard which can be found year round. There are even greens such as coltsfoot, and common wintercress that can be found and consumed even in the depths of Winter.

Part of the attraction of these wild foods is that they bring out the ‘hunter-gatherer’ in all of us. It’s part of our ancestry, our heritage and once you get bitten by the foraging bug you will never quite be the same again. You will find that in spring you serve your dinner guests a hedgerow salad made of wild greens and wild flowers, in summer you will have summer puddings of wild fruit and in autumn you have the harvest of wild nuts and wild mushrooms to draw on. Even in the depths of winter there are stored fruit and wild greens that you can use.

Next time you pass a tangled hedgerow or an overgrown verge why not stop for a moment to look at the range of plant life that exists there. With a simple guide and some patience you will even be able to get yourself a tasty meal from those plants.

Trendy restaurants may be scraping the verges of wild foods to make a statement and make a name for themselves, but you as real cooks can truly appreciate the breadth and depth of the range of wild foodstuffs available to you. They will truly allow you to connect to your ancestors for these are the foods they collected and consumed. Keep the ancient traditions alive and try some wild foods for yourself.

To learn more about wild foods, how to recognize them and cook them take a look at the Wild Food Guide.

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is a cook and Internet author who is passionate about ancient foods and ancient cookery. He shares his knowlege on this subject in his Celtnet Recipes site. His reconstruction of ancient recipes can be found on his Ancient Recipes pages.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dyfed_Lloyd_Evans

Wild rice is high in protein and low in fat. A little goes a long way. One cup of uncooked rice makes about three cups of cooked rice. You can add flavor by cooking the rice in beef, chicken, or vegetable stock. The rice tastes best when slightly crunchy, so keep track of the time. Overcooked rice is mushy and looks like popcorn.

Minnesotans love wild rice. We make wild rice pancakes, breads, salads, soups, side dishes, and desserts. Recently I bought some bratwurst with wild rice and it was delicious. I love wild rice with dried cranberries, caramelized onions, and orange zest . One day, though, I hankered for a steaming bowl of wild rice soup.

Fortunately, I had leftover wild rice and chicken on hand. The other ingredients came from the vegetable bin, freezer and pantry. Since I had made wild rice soup before I was familiar with the method. You may eliminate the sherry if you wish, but it gives give the soup added punch of flavor. Cubed ham may be substituted for chicken. Minnesota Wild Rice Soup with Chicken, Fresh Mushrooms and Sherry is a meal in a bowl.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups cooked wild rice (cooked al dente)

1 1/2 tablespoons butter (or margarine)

1 1/2 tablespoons light olive oil

2 cooked chicken breast halves, cubed

1 carton (8 ounces) sliced mushrooms

3/4 cup frozen chopped onions

6 ounces (half a package) petite carrots

1/2 cup Italian flat leaf parsley, snipped

1 32-ounce carton chicken stock

3 packets very low sodium chicken bullion

1 can (10 3/4 ounces) low sodium mushroom soup

2 soup cans of water (more if needed)

METHOD

Prepare wild rice and chicken the day before. Refrigerate.

Melt butter with olive oil in a soup kettle. Saute mushrooms over high heat until slightly brown. Add remaining ingredients. Cover and simmer over low heat for 20-30 minutes. Just before serving add 1/4 cup very dry sherry to soup. Makes 8-10 servings.

Copyright 2007 by Harriet Hodgson

http://www.harriethodgson.com

Harriet Hodgson has been a freelance nonfiction writer for 28 years. She is a member of the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Association for Death Education and Counseling. Her 24th book, “Smiling Through Your Tears: Anticipating Grief,” written with Lois Krahn, MD, is available from http://www.amazon.com. A five-star review of the book is posted on Amazon. You will find other reviews on the American Hospice Foundation Web site (“School Corner” heading) and the Health Ministries Association Web site.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Harriet_Hodgson